Talking of BYTE: W Jay Dowling wrote a "Dead Jerry" letter that was published in the March 1985 edition of BYTE (W. Jay Dowling. "The Earliest Bug", BYTE. March 1985. 10(3) 350.) giving a longer history of the term. Jerry Pournelle's response was to note that a lot of people had written in to BYTE about its tale of the origin of the term.
The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
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Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#72Mundane observation, but I love reading stories about this era of computing and seeing the history that’s behind all the conventions we take for granted. The “log” was an actual notebook that was manually updated by a human, taking its name from a nautical logbook. The “console” was called that because it was a piece of furniture (a console table) that happened to contain lights that showed the system status. This st…
> The “console” was called that because it was a piece of furniture
I've heard that one's 'study' used to be a piece of furniture which held private papers etc in otherwise non-private or collective housing. Apparently the preferred color and grain of wood for such furniture now informs the conventional look of a "study" as an entire room. Source was moderately credible, IIRC.
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#73The logbook entry only makes sense if "bug" is a pre-existing term for a glitch, otherwise the humor with the real bug would fall flat. So I never understood how anybody could claim that it was the origin of the term.
Yes I thought the author missed this point in his zeal to prove that a Grace Hopper story was a fraud. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can have all kinds of apocryphal stories associated with them, but that's more common among men.
No, xe addressed that point quite explicitly: "Whoever wrote that famous 1947 log entry [...] was making a joke."
The sad fact is that one can find people repeating this tale and incorrectly attributing the origin of the term to Hopper. I'd have to pull my old back issues of BYTE out of storage to check that the January 1984 one did misattribute this as claimed, but it was definitely still a subject for discussion in the BYTE letters pages in 1985.
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#74So, does anybody know why in telegraph jargon they started referring to "false signals" as "bugs"?
I was wondering the same. The picture accompanying that text was a plate from a Vibroplex Bug, a semiautomatic telegraph key.
https://infostory.com/2013/08/27/debugging-the-origin-of-the... talks a bit more about the bug trap and the false signals.
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have missed fountain pens. I found I wrote better when I used one, but it was compulsory at school until I was about 14. At that point, I immediately switched to a ball point pen, mostly to rebel and feel older. I switched back once I was more mature. Dip pens were obsoleted in the late 19th century.
I am a bit skeptical about millions and millions of kids all across the world having fountain pens.
It's up to each school, but it's common in the UK.
Note all the "back to school" offers, and the cheap £4 pen.
https://www.whsmith.co.uk/stationery/pens/fountain-pens/sta0...
(The same might apply in India, in which case there are literally millions of children with fountain pens.)
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#76Grace Hopper telling the bug story, saying that [ THIS PART MIGHT BE WRONG, SEE BELOW: she was there but ] the bug was extracted from the relay and the note written in the logbook by “the operator”: > “ We were building Mark II on the summer of 1945 [...] Mark II stopped. We finally located the failing relay, it was one of the big signal relays, and inside the relay, beaten to death by the relay contacts, was a moth…
Bryan Lunduke is known (at least to me) for trending towards the exaggerated, clickbait style. This being just one of many examples of that approach.
Upvoting for moderate, matter-of-fact language, although there is also exaggeration for fun when someone's values (including self-confessed geeky values and enthusiasm) are clear. YMMV.
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't it also have been called "First World War" because it was the first war where fighting happened - over multiple continents - with huge number of countries participating - at the same time - as part of the same conflict
Arguably, that honor goes to the Seven Years' War, which saw significant fighting both in Europe and in North America. The French Revolutionary Wars/Napoleonic Wars were equally grand in scale, and conducted at a time when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers--all of the major ones got involved in those conflicts at one point or another; even the newly-independent US got peripherally i…
> when the "world" for all practical purposes included only European powers
Why though? I think even China alone had almost as large a population in 1800 (300M) as the US does right now so I'm confused what this is supposed to mean? Japan also had some 30M, Russia 35M. (I haven't checked other countries.)
We're defining "the world" in 1800 to be "European powers" so that we can claim the first world war was actually before World War I?
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, nobody got presented awards for the "First World War".
People did actually start calling WW1 "The first world war" long before WW2 started. There is even few instances of that terminology going back to 1914. They were pessimistic there would be more.
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#79Ada Lovelace wrote what is often considered the first computer program, a set of instructions for the (unbuilt) Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli Numbers.
Appropriately, if this is the first computer program, it also contains the first bug! It's impossible to say whether this was a typesetting error or Lovelace's original, but the transcription of her instructions accidentally transpose a "v4" and "v5".
source: https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.htm...
Re: The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
#80Well, of course. They were very familiar with the term "bug" meaning defect or flaw in an engineered system, so the joke was that here was a flesh-and-blood "bug." It's obvious from the phrasing that the term "bug" was commonly used.